THEY were the belted men with big beards and axes who pillaged their way round the world, weren’t they?

“Sorry, the Vikings really were that bad”, confirmed one recent headline in the Spectator magazine. But academic Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is having none of it.

She told a capacity audience in Hexham Abbey’s Great Hall: “The article said ‘forget the guff about traders and travellers’.

“No! Let’s not forget about it, because the Norse travelled far and wide – they were in touch with more of the world than anyone else in that period.

“When we say Norse, we are talking about the whole Nordic world, in the Viking age and beyond, so I wanted to do more than just deconstruct the image of ‘raiders versus traders’.

“I wanted to look at how the Norse saw the world and their place in it.”

The Viking world began in Scandinavia, but it was on foreign shores their story became interesting.

The Norsemen travelled to all points of the compass, to Africa, Russia, to the edge of America, Greenland and many other places besides, and a raft of archaeological finds, ancient manuscripts and folklore charted their progress.

“They went all the way to the Islamic Caliphate, riding long distances on camel back to trade, according to one Islamic text,” she said. “This is not the image we have of the Vikings today.”

They have certainly left their mark on our culture. You see it when you drive through Yorkshire and places such as Grimsby, Wetherby and Scunthorpe – “by” is Norse for “town” and “thorpe” means hamlet or small village.

She said: “You are listening to this in English, which means there are a lot of Norse words in it. Do you like an ‘egg’ in the morning? Do you talk about the ‘dregs’ of the tea? Do you go ‘berserk’ with anger?

“If someone uses a ‘knife’ to take the last piece of ‘cake’ that you were saving for your ‘guests’, then you are speaking Norse.”

The Sagas of Icelanders, medieval Iceland’s legacy to the world written in the 13th century, contains stories that have been passed down word-of-mouth over generations. “They rival any Shakespearean or Greek tragedy,” said Eleanor.

The sagas inhabit that hazy world between fact and fiction and yet, brimming with larger-than-life characters, they tell the story of their age.

As part and parcel of her PhD research, Eleanor followed in the footsteps of the Norse traders who had ventured to the cruel climes of Greenland. The Sagas recorded the fact it was the notorious Erik the Red, who had been exiled for killing a neighbour, who became the first European to put down roots there, in 985.

Two settlements sprang up, on the east and west coasts, and then a third, which acted as a springboard for those heading for the Arctic.

“I went up to those northern hunting grounds,” said Eleanor, “to the land of the midnight sun.

“There were no permanent settlements there, but it was in the Arctic that the Norse traders gained the unique artefacts they could trade.

“They included walrus ivory and the walrus skins they turned into the strongest ships’ ropes of the time. They were both very valuable commodities and good reasons to go into the dangerous hunting lands of the north.”